No; that was an excuse, to the extent it even happened. American soldiers were determined to not take prisoners.
Our soldiers and our nation were villains; they were just lesser villains than their enemies.
Because it’s more effective and makes us look more reasonable. Then we use it to kill people pretty much at random.
Nonsense. We don’t carpet bomb Pakistan, we use drones to take our particular bastards.
Taking trophies from dead bodies is…gross, I guess, but it is a world apart from inflicting brutal torture and murder on living human beings. And the Japanese did this as a matter of policy, whereas the US troops who did it were punished.
In these kinds of discussions, there’s always someone trying to argue that the Americans were no better than our enemies. These people are, I believe, morally bankrupt.
Sorry, missed the edit window. I wanted to add the following:
The Japanese were brutal to our prisoners. Many, many accounts of our patrols finding an American prisoner tied to a tree and beheaded or disemboweled were verified. Or the finding of our prisoners used for food, their livers and muscle tissue carefully cut out as if by a butcher. Can you really blame a soldier for having a take no prisoners attitude after seeing that?
You are correct in this statement. From the after action interviews that I have read our soldiers in the Pacific didn’t really see the Japanese as human. The atrocities they witnesses combined with such a different culture attributed to this. The average American soldier couldn’t relate in the least to the average Japanese, however it was different in Europe. The average German was not much different from us in the way they lived and could easily be identifiable to the average American soldier. The Japanese were considered “sub-human” a term I have read many times by combat soldiers in the Pacific. An interesting part of the after action interviews was one question asked both of the European soldiers and the Pacific soldiers. It was something along the lines of “Do you want to kill as many German (Japanese) soldiers as you can”. The European soldiers were much less inclined to answer yes than the ones in the Pacific.
We use drones to kill people by guesswork, then declare them terrorists after the fact. If they are innocent it doesn’t matter; they aren’t American, so they don’t count as human. Or even as animals, we’d be sorrier about killing innocent dogs & cats.
I do not know that we were “nicer” but we had a much higher moral standard than our enemies did. Sure some of our soldiers tortured raped and murdered, but you know, the experience of seeing a lot of your buddies brutally killed and having to kill others and knwing that YOU can be killed probably has a certain psychological effect on soldiers. I doubt if ANY army manages to avoid brutalizing others if they have units that suffer casualties, which is pretty darned common in wartime.
That said, culture and official policy goes a long way in explaining how soldiers behave. A large part of American propaganda emphasized how bestial and inhuman the Nazis and Japanese treated prisoners. And there was PLENTY of evidence to back it up. Part of our justification for being in the war was that we were morally superior to them … and so we emphasized behaving in a morally superior manner … and for the most part, we DID.
Which is why it is so dismaying to see our Republican politicians, voters, etc., embracing torture as official policy. Puts us on the same ground as the Nazis and Japanese. A VERY bad thing, culturally speaking.
See the very valid reasons for our soldiers not taking Japanese prisoners. The chance of being killed by a surrendering Japanese hiding a grenade was too great. If you can honestly tell me that you would have risked your life to take a prisoner when you knew from experience what had happened to your brothers who tried before you, then you are a braver man than me.
Really? Because it makes us look more reasonable? That is your answer? Really hate the military don’t you? The fact is we do all we can to minimize death, although in war that is not always possible.
:rolleyes:
Well, you got me there. If that is the way it really is I think that we should immediately stop using all conventional weapons. From now on we should only use nuclear weapons on any enemy, big or small. Since we don’t care in the least about who or what we kill let’s kill them all. Nuke every single “enemy” of America, then Der Trihs at least in the future when you make such outrageous claims you will be correct. I mean we have been so inefficient using bombs and bullets to accomplish our goal of inflicting as many casualties on innocent people when we could have saved billions of dollars and tons of time by just dropping a few nukes.
Because what you are saying is that every single member of our Armed Forces is a psychopathic killer, hell bent on killing as many people as possible. They only joined the military in order to kill without going to jail. How you can believe this is beyond me and I am guessing that you haven’t worn the uniform, but count on the very people you accuse of mass murder for your protection.
Just out of curiosity were we even justified in entering the WWII? Or should we have just shrugged off the deaths of 3,000 Americans at Pearl Harbor and not really worried about it? Should we have overlooked Hitler and his dreams of European and possibly world conquest? Just curious.
I am also wondering that when the US Military reacted and went overseas to aid victims of earthquakes and tsunamis and the like were they killing everything they saw while they were there as well? I suppose the medical aid and the food supply that was accomplished was nothing more than a front for us to get into another country so we could kill them all.
The fact is that the American soldier is a selfless person who is willing to give up years of his life to protect others. He is willing to sacrifice himself in order to see that justice is done in this world. Is he perfect? Nope, not by a long shot, however the military justice system is and was pretty effective in prosecuting those responsible for crimes such as rape and illegal killings. (notice I didn’t say 100% effective, I realize that there were some incidents that went unpunished. Life isn’t perfect). To characterize our soldiers as something else is truly disgusting.
Oh, you may be certain that the United States hated the hell out of Germany after the war. We quite literally tried to starve them to death and put them back 200 years.
JCS 1067, the integral part of the Morgenthau Plan, was in effect from May 1945 to summer 1947.
The only thing, the only thing, that saved Germany was their industrial might and what it could do to rebuild the parts of Europe that we did care about. Were it not for that Germany would be nothing but farmers and sheepherders to this very day.
Your real question should be: “Why is propaganda so effective in the US?”
Besides Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. and U.K. got together for the bombing of Dresden and other cities. Although most of the targets were necessary to the war effort in one way or another, it was pretty brutal.
This thread is ridiculous. Yes the US was not nearly as bad as the Nazis or the Soviets but that doesn’t mean they were “nice”. The indiscriminate bombing of German and Japanese cities were massive war-crimes and the likes of McNamara and Curtis Le May admitted as much. If these bombings are justified as having “military applications” the same argument could be made for Japanese massacre of Chinese civilians. After all terror as a military tactic has a very long history but that doesn’t make it any less evil.
Let’s not whitewash history either. The fighting in the Pacific was vicious, horrible and brutal. Not taking prisoners was understandable, but calling it correct and just is an obscene mockery.
Nonsense, our primary goal is to win with as few **friendly **casualties as possible. There’s nothing remotely wrong with such a goal, but let’s not ascribe a false nobility to it. Precision munitions aren’t developed and used in order to not kill people; they are developed and used because they are more effective than random indiscriminate bombing.
Except that they ARE used, at least in part, to not kill more people than we are trying to. When you kill the civilians, they hate you a lot.
Which is part of how they are more effective than indiscriminate bombing. Before WW2 it was widely believed that bombing cities would cause widespread panic and crush the morale of the civilian populations. One of the findings of the US Strategic Bombing Survey conducted after the war was that bombing civilians had little or no effect on morale and may have at times slightly increased it. In retrospect it’s not all that surprising; one can hardly surrender to a bomber. After WW2 but before precision munitions made their appearance on the stage dropping huge amounts of dumb bombs was par for the course. The US dropped more tons of bombs on Cambodia alone during the war in Vietnam than it dropped on the entire Axis combined in WW2, the nuclear bombs included.
Interesting accusation.
Btw, are you familiar with the training soldiers undergo? Let me give you a hint: a normal human psyche is not wired to kill other humans.
People that join the military do so for a wide variety of reasons, many born of ignorance. It is very easy and predictable for people to be offended by anyone criticizing the US military, it’s practically a required grade-school course to be socialized to react this way in the US. It’s certainly a lifelong message one gets from the media. Soldiers are treated as saints here and to pretend that they are somehow treated badly socially is absurd.
Throwing a hissy fit every time someone lays out uncomfortable facts has proven to be an acceptable reaction and effective in silencing criticism of the military though so go on ahead and continue to do it, plenty of pats on the back coming for you.
The truth is that regardless of the individual motivations of members of the military, (My grandfather, uncle, father and brother all served btw and were/are good people) they are put into motion to do horrible things more and more not out of defense against anything but for the perceived and actual economic benefits of doing so. We rely on a world where our corporations have unfettered access to foreign markets, we perceive oil reserves in the middle east as a key strategic leverage point, we perceive leftist political movements as a threat to our economic methods, we are lobbied by foreign entities and domestic weapons manufacturers as well as most large corporations to continue these actions, the elite of our country understand that a country that is perpetually at war is a country with people who are easier to manipulate into submissive economic and political positions, ect ect ect.
When you engage in mass violence for defense it is justified. We are not defending ourselves but .0001% of the time with our military now. What we are doing now is criminal, evil and anyone without vested interests in maintaining the illusions would agree.
It is difficult for members of the military to quit when they want to or refuse to obey orders. The whole military is designed to prevent individual decision making so it’s not like there is a realistic way for the people in the military to stop what it is doing. That would be the job of the domestic population to promote discussion of what our military is doing and demand that it stop. We dishonor our soldiers with out silence. It allows the people in charge to keep using them for the most shameful of pursuits: murder for money and power.
A better question would be, why do Americans believe their own propaganda? And additionally, why are they surprised when it backfires on them.
Allied atrocities undeniably happened in WW2, but overall even if it’s only the impression of Allies being ‘nicer’, there might be a few reasons:
continued intensely isolationist streak among some people in the US, who felt this wasn’t our war. I’ve read some articles of the time arguing that Pearl Harbour was the result of Roosevelt getting nosy with China and Australia and placing oil embargoes on Japan. Likewise with Europe - Roosevelt may have tried to keep America out of the war but he was far from ‘neutral’. Consequently there was pressure that, as America’s in the war, it should avoid being seen as ‘responsible’ for its horrid nature as much as possible.
British experience of the war crimes and trenches of WW1. British propaganda mercilessly demonised the Central Powers in WW1, so much so that by the time Germany surrendered the demands for retribution and revenge were at fever pitch. In WW2 the impression I get is that British propaganda was more measured - mostly attacking the Nazi leadership. Ever seen the wartime movie Colonel Blimp? (Although that was censored by Churchill as too accomodating).
Just two possibilities anyway.